In 1990, because of consumer outrage, Lotus Development Corp. abruptly cancelled the pending release of its second product entry into the Macintosh market. The product, Lotus MarketPlace: Households, was a CD-ROM that contained extensive demographic data on 120 million U.S. consumers. The information was already available to marketing professionals in other forms, but consumers were outraged that all of that information would be concentrated on a single disc.
Lotus provided a way for consumers to remove their names from the database, although one wonders about the effectiveness of such an approach, given the relatively few people that even knew of the disc’s existence. Nonetheless, more than thirty thousand people requested to have their names and other personal information removed from the database, citing privacy issues. Lotus cancelled the product.
